D2 Video

Ampex introduced D2 in 1988 as a lower-cost alternative to D1. Like D1, D2 is a 3/4” digital videotape housed in a cassette with four discreet channels of 48kHz digital audio, an analog cue track, and a time code channel. D2 was the first video format to offer “read before write” or “pre-read,” which allowed simultaneous playback and recording on the same VTR. The video on a D2 cassette is recorded as an uncompressed composite video signal instead of the uncompressed component signal recorded to D1, and this makes it slightly less expensive to produce.

This definition is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html . It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D2_%28video_format%29 .

This D2 machine plays back two sizes of D2 cassette tapes.